


This is my path, until I am the path.

by Alias (anafabula)



Series: you must know where you stop and the world begins [5]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: ...sort of?, Age of the Beholding (The Magnus Archives), Ambiguous Everything Else Also, Ambiguous Relationships, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon-Typical The Beholding Content (The Magnus Archives), Character Study, Episode Tag: e194 Parting, Experimental Style, Flash Fic, Horror, Identity Issues, Other, Unreliable Narrator, multiple interpretations, one or more may even be canon-compliant, perhaps the options that you choose from among those given will be true
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-18 06:14:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29485038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: There is one last question of what remains.
Relationships: The Beholding & Elias Bouchard | Jonah Magnus, The Beholding/Elias Bouchard | Jonah Magnus
Series: you must know where you stop and the world begins [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1217580
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13





	This is my path, until I am the path.

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The understanding is too much for my soul to hold, and so my soul will open.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29055567) by [Alias (anafabula)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias). 



> Sticking with the Cultist Simulator quote titles for post-Change fic, apparently—this is from the Priest DLC. Conclusions could be drawn from the invocation of a different principle, the one which supersedes and does not conquer, I’d imagine.

* * *

It is desire, and so it is desired, all-consumingly so.

Does that mean he wants this? _Did_ he—

  
  


**{I}**

Yes, to the limited extent as he’d ever considered the prospect – because in truth even he had not quite presumed to know just what to expect, not really, not when the very premise of the endeavor required unthinkable transformation from the world-that-was. He’d realized logically enough that anything he was still capable of imagining the ramifications of did not go far enough to be a realistic outcome of such unreal victories. So he’d known he couldn’t know what to expect, and by and large hadn’t thought—

**{II}**

When he was so much younger as to almost be a different person, barely yet anything of note but gradually realizing that the thing he was must be something wholly new. He’d chafed at his limitations, that seemed almost a form of existential mockery: such power as would take him years to be merely satisfied with, to want anything beyond, but constrained by the scope of one man’s attention, and hardly an impressive amount of that besides. Vision to match his dreams – literally so, in the best of ways – but curtailed still by only being meaningfully able to look in a single direction at a time. True that, when he’d tried to imagine what it would be like to be free of the bounds of his own mere and singular viewpoint, he could not think of an answer, by definition; but he spent years thinking about the prospect of imagining it, first.

**{III}**

Later he realized such boundaries were necessary factors of still, ultimately, having – being – a mind shaped like a human mind. Something with closely-guarded thoughts and closer-guarded feelings and endless critical evaluations; something shaped like and shaped by one man’s will and one man’s will alone. Did that render it more bearable, to exist between the panoramic glut of his possible Knowing and the empty immensity of how much, second-on-second, he was at the same time forced to let go Unseen and ignored? — Perhaps. Perhaps that was enough to mollify him in this respect. Perhaps.

**{IV}**

If he’d pictured otherwise, successfully, might he have imagined this – this endless present moment-that-is? Simply by thinking towards the most extreme possible extrapolation from where he had once stood? From anything: everything. Everything. This.

**{V}**

And does that mean he’d yearned for it already, words for wanting so be damned? _Did he first want it?_ Consider—

**{VI}**

The way he’d wanted more since before he could have understood what it was he truly wanted at all. Had sharpened himself like a blade against it. Just how easily he’d meaningfully proven once and again that he’d been thus shaped for one path and one path only: the heady, miserable thrill of genuine loss, the simple joys of agonized fear, the genuinely difficult complexity that was betrayal. How naturally it came to him to still take all of it with nary a flinch or contradiction, long before he was empowered in such a way as to encourage it as well. How naturally it came to him to gravitate toward sheer extremity for extremity’s sake, the rest all factors of the world around him. In order to refine it to an extent beyond the human, he must first have had such a nature all his own.

**{VII}**

Some dispassionate part of him catalogued the changes, over the years. Dispassionate, as his own passions shifted; as he’d note the way he’d struggled to accept such experiences, and, later, how the struggling had stopped; as the necessity of not maintaining an opinion on the matter became second nature to him, and he let go of what might, once, before it, have been considered first.

**{VIII}**

For two humanly impossible centuries he’d been driven so, unrelenting, as if he could render himself more than that purified drive and escape through sheer abstraction. Certainly when confronted with the prospect of a question, he’d acted with that clarity of purpose alone. But among the things that might otherwise have muddled the issue if the act of questioning had ever instantiated itself was that therefore-impossible unknown: if he was his purpose in every way that could possibly matter, and then that purpose were some day, at last, fulfilled, what would be left?

**{IX}**

The white-knuckled grip he’d kept on every shred of proof that so much as hinted toward who he was. Not what. In this one sense, not what. _Who._ Evidence of the man that he had been; evidence he was still. Most precious of all, his own choices: every one that was truly his, even the mistakes. Especially the mistakes.

**{X}**

Memories used like litmus strips: nothing beyond him would care for this fragment of a book, that letter, these now-anonymous bones. That was him. That was him.

**{XI}**

So did he come with time to appreciate that truncated perspective within which he had to live, the hard human limit of his own eyes, as something he could never free himself from if he were trying? If his own shortcomings were as blinders, was that evidence the viewpoint in question was still his?

**{XII}**

_Consider_ : that he’d gravitated towards this end as naturally as falling, and for an outcome to be put to years of free fall was to be, at last, to an impossibly – unimaginably – perfect extent, fulfilled. As if he’d known what to be waiting for, all along, from the glints of mere possibility that had sparked and reflected off of him. As if he’d been preparing, all this time, and now – and now. Finally, finally; and final; and unconstrained, and infinite.

**{XIII}**

_Consider_ : he still felt the way the fabric of his being shifted and twisted over time, as if pulled by strange tides from beneath him; and what remained within his power was only ever to remember what it was that had been transformed and who that meant he might’ve been before; and so he was uniquely able, at the last step of the way, to quantify just how much he’d had left to change before he’d be what wholly welcomed it a moment later.

**{XIV}**

_Consider_ : if without the want that had been his reason and sustained his unnatural life until the final moment it could not, nothing remained of him at all.

* * *

**{XV}**

_(—Yes.)_

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Took a lot of convincing not to make the summary “Play games. Win prizes. The rest is genre.” I’m still not entirely sure I could explain why.


End file.
